fusion of inner and outher space

The song of Fred Loesser couldn’t say it better. The old rhetoric about cold war has came back. And it is more transparent than ever. And its roots as well. Reminds me on 2006 Ramsfeld’s saying: “The solution for this is ….. an attack.” Seems that people in America are not afraid of Iraq and Afganistan terrorist anymore. They are under control more or less according to neocons. Big oil deals have been done there. New treat is needed cos human brain becomes adopted very soon. Either too good or bad stuff. And what is better than an old enemy still as archetype in westerns’ mind: Russia. Who is just too close to their interests. To BTC pipe line. To goals of the Project for New American Century. Why now, just in front of American elections?

I’ve been amazed while reading it during my holidays. It’s all about defence and zillions of invented reasons why is needed to increase US military budget. People from other planet would read it like New Century = New war. They (PNAC) put the target for defence budget from 3,4% of GDP to 3,8% of US GDP. Officially is 3,7% of GDP now. Adding Black budget is probably more than 3,8%. Goal is achieved. But they have to maintain it with new neocon president. Democrats might decrease it as they are accused in those papers. It’s amazing that those people rule and might rule further. As nothing in New century is important – only american leading rule on the world and higher military budget.

McCain can be only war president as some commentators say. New cold war can tremendously increase military spending. And how can you call Defense shield in Poland than challenging the Russia. When Russia did it in 1962 on Cuba US went insane cos they came to close to them. And Poland is closer than Cuba. I am not pro-Russian. I lived in Communist regime and know what it was looked like. Won’t go back. We celebrated when international community accepted our will to independance. As people from Kosovo were. Why are they different rules for Ossetia? Because of BTC pipe? Because of American dominant role on the world?

It’s morally questionable that McCain and Geogian president have(had) the same consultant. Randy Scheunemann. Its important to see who this guy is to understand the past and the future of McCain policy. The guy who was director of the Project for new American century. Ex-adviser of Ramsfeld. And the guy who was executive director of the The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq . And some other guys from PNAC (see bellow) are consultants for Baltic republics, etc… Since almost all top members of Project for new american Century are current McCain advisers it just couldn’t be different as it is. (See bellow their political background)

MCCain said “we are all Georgians now”. If Mikheil Saakashvili had really attacked its own citizens, than his words are a bad news for America.

Video: Truth about Ossetia from 12 years old girl, whu run from Georgia gunfire

Scheunemannhasbeen criticized for his close association with Ahmad Chalabi during the George W. Bush administration’s campaign to generate public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In mid-July 2008, The Sunday Times linked ScheunemanntoStephen Payne, a lobbyist covertly filmed as he offered to arrange meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and others, in exchange for donations to the George W. Bush presidential library. Payne said Scheunemannhadbeen “working with me on my payroll for five of the last eight years”.

Until March of 2008, Scheunemann lobbied for Republic of Georgia as a registered foreign agent. In August 2008, Barak Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan supposed that Scheunemann’s past lobbying may have been a reason of McCain openly taking Georgia’s side in 2008 South Ossetia war.

Scheunemann’s resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9-11. He signed the PNACultimatumto Bush, nine days after 9-11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war

Established in the spring of 1997, the Project for the New American Century is a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. The Project is an initiative of the New Citizenship Project (501c3); the New Citizenship Project’s chairman is William Kristol and its president is Gary Schmitt.

Project Directors

While the foreign affairs advisor to Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Scheunemann was also a registered foreign agent (lobbyist) for the Republic of Georgia[5] [6]

On April 17, 2008, McCain spoke on the phone with Georgia President Mikheil SaakashviliaboutRussian efforts to gain leverage over two of Georgia’s troubled provinces. That same day, McCain issued a public statement condemning Russia and expressing strong support for the Georgian position. Also on that same day, Georgia signed a new, $200,000 lobbying contract with Scheunemann’s firm, Orion Strategies. Scheunemann remained with Orion Strategies until May 15, when the McCain campaign imposed a tough new anti-lobbyist policy and he was required to separate himself from the company.[7]

In mid-July 2008, The Sunday Timeslinked Scheunemannto Stephen Payne, a lobbyist covertly filmed as he offered to arrange meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and others, in exchange for donations to the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Payne said Scheunemannhadbeen “working with me on my payroll for five of the last eight years.” [8]

Payne’s clients have included JPMorgan Chase,[9] Morgan Stanley,[6] United Space Alliance,[10] SAP Software,[10] Nextel Communications,[6] Continental Airlines,[11] YukosOil,[6] Boeing,[6] Lockheed Martin,[6] and Nuclear Solutions, Inc. [12] He has served as Honorary Consul General for the Republic of Latvia for the Texas region (with headquarters in Houston) since 1999,[8][13] and has served as an adviser to Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga on political and economic issues.[5] He has also served on the board of directors of the U.S.-Baltic Foundation, which promotes free markets in the Baltic States.[14] He has also served on the board of the National Defense University Foundation.[8] In a promotional brochure for Worldwide Strategic Partners, he claims to have arranged an official meeting between the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev and U.S. president George W. Bush in April 2006, something the Azerbaijani president had been attempting for three years.[11] He also assisted in having the Uzbek politician Muhammad Salih’s name removed from the U.S.’s terrorist watchlist.[11]In addition, he engaged in negotiations with Pervez Musharrafwith a group called Team Eagle (also known as Team Barakat).[10][15] He has also lobbied on behalf of the governments of Turkmenistan and the United Arab Emirates,[10] and performed consulting in Iraq, which he has visited twice.[10]

The lobbyist Randy Scheunemannhas collaborated withPayne’s firms since 2002,[2]and Payne has also partnered in his various business ventures with Frank Carlucci, Michael S. Han, Ying Wang, and W. Dieter Zander.[7]

A long-time proponent of NATO expansion, Jackson was instrumental in securing US Senate ratification of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary as members of NATO and organizing the second “Vilnius Round” of NATO expansion which brought the Baltic States, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria into both NATO and the European Union. Since 2002, he has been active in the Balkans and post-Soviet democracies advocating democratic reform and EU accession.

He is a foreign policy advisor to John McCain, the presumed Republican Party nominee for President of the United States in the upcoming 2008 election.[5][6]Kagan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century(PNAC) and was one of the signers of the January 26, 1998, “PNAC Letter” sent to US President Bill Clinton, promoting regime change in Iraq.[7] Robert’s brother Frederick and father Donaldarealso affiliated with PNAC.

However, Kristol has not always fallen in line behind the Bush administration, and has on occasion criticized George W. Bush for not being conservative enough. In 2004, he wrote an op-ed strongly criticizing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.[8] He was also the first of many conservatives to publicly oppose Bush’s second U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers. He said of Miers: “I’m disappointed, depressed, and demoralized. […] It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that President Bush flinched from a fight on constitutional philosophy. Miers is undoubtedly a decent and competent person. But her selection will unavoidably be judged as reflecting a combination of cronyism and capitulation on the part of the president.”

He has also been a vocal supporter of the Israeli attack on Lebanon, stating that the war is “our war too,” referring to the United States. He continues to back the Iraq war, and favors imposing sanctions on Iran.[9]

During the early 1970s Rumsfeld became Mr. Carlucci’s protégé as Mr. Carlucci showed him the ropes. Carlucci was Undersecretary of Health, Education and Welfare when Caspar Weinbergerwas secretary during the Nixon administration. Carlucci became Ambassador to Portugal, and served in this position from 1974 until 1977. Carlucci was Deputy Director of the CIA from 1978-1981, under CIA Director Stansfield Turner. Carlucci was deputy defense secretary from 1981 until 1983 [1], national security advisor from 1986 until 1987, and defense secretary in 1987, following the resignation of Weinberger, his nomination by President Ronald Reagan and his confirmation in the Senate by a vote of 91 to 1. He was reportedly less hard-line in policies toward the Soviet Union than Weinberger.

On January 5, 2006, he participated in a meeting at the White House of former Secretaries of Defense and State to discuss United States foreign policy with Bush administration officials.

Carlucci served as chairman of the Carlyle Group from 1992-2003, and chairman emeritus until 2005. He also has business interests in the following companies: General Dynamics, Westinghouse, Ashland Oil, Neurogen, CB Commercial Real Estate, Nortel, BDM International, Quaker Oats, and Kaman. Carlucci is Chairman of Envion USA, and former director of Wackenhut. He is a senior member of the Frontier Group, a private equity investment firm founded by Sanford McDonnelland David Robb. Carlucci is an Advisory board member of G2 Satellite Solutions and the Chairman Emeritus of Nortel Networks

He is affiliated with the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, a neo-conservative thinktank.[citation needed]He formerly sat on the Board of Directors of the Middle East Policy Council.[citation needed] He is Chairman Emeritus of the US-Taiwan Business Council.[citation needed]Carlucci is a member of the Board of Trustees of the RAND Corporationand founding co-chair of the Advisory Board for RAND’s Center for Middle East Public Policy.

=====================================================

Fred Loesser: Baby, it’s cold outside

===========================================

PNAC:

June 3, 1997

American foreign and defense policy is adrift. Conservatives have criticized the incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration. They have also resisted isolationist impulses from within their own ranks. But conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America’s role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. They have allowed differences over tactics to obscure potential agreement on strategic objectives. And they have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century.

We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.

As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?

We are in danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge. We are living off the capital — both the military investments and the foreign policy achievements — built up by past administrations. Cuts in foreign affairs and defense spending, inattention to the tools of statecraft, and inconstant leadership are making it increasingly difficult to sustain American influence around the world. And the promise of short-term commercial benefits threatens to override strategic considerations. As a consequence, we are jeopardizing the nation’s ability to meet present threats and to deal with potentially greater challenges that lie ahead.

We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration’s success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities.

Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership or the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.

Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:

we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future; we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values; we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.

Such a Reaganitepolicy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.

Watched very good documentary THUNDERBOLTS OF THE GODS by David Talbott, Wallace Thornhill: Electric Universe. It challenges many of today’s theories of cosmology. The nature of sun, galaxies, comets, the whole universe we thought of it today within well adopted concepts as big bang, gravity, fusion, …is shown in new light. Universe as electric universe.

I like the concept of electric universe due to two reasons: firstly – it doubts about current concepts and it might contribute to shift of old paradigms which to some extent limit our further thoughts of nature of our world; and secondly – to me as great admirer of Nikola Tesla, the concept is very similar to what Nikola Tesla already proposed more than 100 years ago: Electromagnetic energy fills all space; gravity is not the most important force in universe; time is just mere man-made reference (Motion through space produces the “illusion of time”; aether (plasma) which feels the whole universe (ultimate medium – without it there wouldn’t be any electromagnetic force), … On the other hand the whole concept of aether which is necessary for EM force is in Eastern philosophy named Akasha, 5th physical element which can not be percived, essence of all things, the source that everything exists. So maybe the shift in paradigm could bring closer science and old philosophical knowledge, and narrow the gap between dualistic and holistic thinking.

I am always amazed how genius Tesla was. How different world would be today if they were listened him more. And his interest in vedic phylosophy is deeply visible in his brilliant work. As early as 1891 Tesla described the universe as a kinetic system filled with energy which could be harnessed at any location. His concepts during the following years were greatly influenced by the teachings of Swami Vivekananda.

Theory structure

Tesla said he had fully developed his Dynamic Theory of Gravity and “worked it out in all the details“. This aether-based theory, which initially was developed between 1893-94, explained gravity and directly linked it to electromagnetic phenomena, explaining also that the sun and all stars emit “primary solar rays” which in turn produce secondary radiations. Tesla’s theory states that the phenomena produced by electromagnetic forces is the most important phenomenon in the universe. According to portions from his theory, mechanical motions are universally a result of electromagnetic force acting upon and through media. Unfortunately, no mathematical details of the theory have officially surfaced.

Tesla demonstrated that all bodies have electrical content and as such, are all moving charges as our earth hurls through space at incredible speed (hence ‘dynamic’). He demonstrated, through the use of his particular evacuated tubes and high voltage coils powered by specifically designed high frequency alternators, how earth emanates “microwaves” and how it behaves as a charged sphere. Based on these discoveries and their confirmation at Colorado Springs, he developed and tested his first electromagnetic machine that could fly “devoid of sustaining wings, propellers or gas bags“.

Non-hertzian waves

In the Responses to Questions (http://www.pbs.org/tesla/dis/responses.html) on December 20, 2000 of various authors and researchers concerning Dr. Tesla, it is reported that Tesla’s concept of “electromagnetic momentum” appears to have been gleamed from Maxwell’s original work (ed. the equation usually referred to as the Maxwell’s equation in use today were written by Oliver Heaviside and could rightly then be called the “Maxwell-Heaviside equations”). Tesla was familiar with the quaternion notation in Maxwell’s work and often referred to Maxwell’s books. Tesla also conveyed the notion of J. Zenneck’s longitudal ground wave as the non-Hertzian wave he was talking about. These are now known today in microwave field theory as “surface waves”. Tesla calls attention to a “field of force” being indispensable for explaining the movements of astronomical objects (a concept that fields model the phenomenon more precisely). Heaviside himself offered “a gravitational and electromagnetic analogy (http://www.as.wvu.edu/coll03/phys/www/Heavisid.htm)” (The Electrician, 1893). Others have continued this line of work. Oleg D. Jefimenko wrote the book “Causality, electromagnetic induction, and gravitation : a different approach to the theory of electromagnetic and gravitational fields” (Star City [West Virginia] : Electret Scientific Co., c1992. ISBN 0917406095 ).

Tesla published a prepared statement on his 81st birthday (July 10, 1937) critiquing Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. The following is a portion of that statement:

“… Supposing that the bodies act upon the surrounding space causing curving of the same, it appears to my simple mind that the curved spaces must react on the bodies, and producing the opposite effects, straightening out the curves. Since action and reaction are coexistent, it follows that the supposed curvature of space is entirely impossible – But even if it existed it would not explain the motions of the bodies as observed. Only the existence of a field of force can account for the motions of the bodies as observed, and its assumption dispenses with space curvature. All literature on this subject is futile and destined to oblivion. So are all attempts to explain the workings of the universe without recognizing the existence of the ether and the indispensable function it plays in the phenomena.”
“My second discovery was of a physical truth of the greatest importance. As I have searched the entire scientific records in more than a half dozen languages for a long time without finding the least anticipation, I consider myself the original discoverer of this truth, which can be expressed by the statement: There is no energy in matter other than that received from the environment.” — Nikola Tesla

While this statement asserted that Tesla had “worked out a dynamic theory of gravity” that he soon hoped to give to the world, he reportedly died before he publicized the details. There is still a halo of mystery around his death – even the exact date is not certain. It is speculated that his death may have been caused by too much “pressure” by agents in order to extract and obtain the secret documents regarding this theory.

Unfortunately few details were publicly revealed by Tesla about his theory. Available details argument against space being curved by gravitational effects, which leads some to believe Tesla failed to understand Einstein’s theory is not about curved space at all, but curved space-time. However, there is disagreement about Tesla’s exact understanding of Einstein’s theories; Tesla was actively conducting tangible experiments during the time of Einstein’s theoretical research. He underlined that time was a mere man-made reference used for convenience and as such the idea of a “curved space-time” was delusional, hence there was no basis for the Relativistic “space-time” binomium concept.

Tesla’s aether concept

It is important to correctly comprehend Tesla’s unique aether concept. The theory refers to an aether, but Tesla’s aether is not analogous to classical aether theories. John J. O’Neill stated,

“Long ago he recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into infinitesimal whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion ceases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance.” (Grotz, 1997)

Tesla’s aether is in fact a medium, “a perfect fluid” that wets everything in which are immersed “independent carriers“. It behaves as a solid to light (high frequency) and is transparent to matter, while it’s effects can be felt through inertia. Tesla demonstrated how this aether could be “polarized” and made “rigid” through a particular high frequency alternator and single terminal coil (ex. 1892 lecture in London) and 2 metal plates which he “suspended” in the air making the space between them rigid “privately” on one another (ed. the tesla effect). In 1894, Tesla invented a special bulb (which was the ultimate result of his research in vacuum tubes; the unipolar “targetless” bulb) which augmented this technology to create “tubes of force” which could be used for motive power (what Tesla later cited as “veritable ropes of air“).

Components

This theory is a logical extension of the rotating magnetic field model. According to the Swami Vivekananda,

“the Vedantic Prana and Akasha and the Kalpas, which according to [Tesla was] the only theories modern science can entertain [… he] thinks he can demonstrate that mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy” (Grotz, 1997)

Tesla electromagnetics are composed of potentials and their corresponding motion. This potential’s motion causes in the surrounding medium an equivalent and opposite effect (determining the positive and negative character of the medium). Some elements of the theory may include:

All ponderable bodies are constantly in motion in through space.

Absence of a medium would result in no electromagnetic forces (the space-vacuum fabric is a medium, the aether (the ultimate medium))

Ponderable bodies and other media filling space all possess a dielectric level.

Motion through space produces the “illusion of time”.

Mechanical effects are produced by electromagnetic forces acting through media (i.e., momentum and inertia is electromagnetic in nature; Energy is force over time)

A media exposed to resonant vibrations of electromagnetic force interact.

Electromagnetic energy fills all space (referred to as radiant energy).

Electromagnetic force is a phenomenon produced through the medium in space (eg., the result of the medium acting upon ponderable matter).

Tesla never referred to “space-time” directly, referring instead to the concept of the “primary substance”. He also never used this relativistic “twin” term. He considered time as a mere man-made “measure” of the rate at which events occur such as a distance travelled (in miles or kms) in a certain period of time, for a frame of reference. He considered the “curving” of space to be absurd (putting it in gentle terms) saying that if a moving body curved space the “equal and opposite” reaction of space on the body would “straighten space back out“.

Contrasts and knowledge

Tesla’s theory put him in direct contrast with the re-emerging Relativity theory, which is that energy does not directly originate from matter or vice versa, but that matter behaves as a medium for forces to act upon or to act through, and that without matter there is no Energy (nor Force) and vice versa (he said a body without force is like a body without a mind).

All this energy (sometimes viewed as “Zero Point Energy“) comes from the environment (through aether or the “medium”) and reverts back to the environment giving life to matter, forming a “closed circuit” through one way or the other (being “accessed” more efficiently or less based on the methodology). It is omnipresent, day or night, and is “re-emitted” by every star in our universe naturally including our sun. Tesla knew every “ponderable body” had an electrical content, and as such, proportionally interacted with the surrounding aether. The earth is like a charged sphere hurling through space (thus a current, hence magnetic field), around the sun powered by it’s primary rays (and giant electric currents along “frozen magnetic lines of force”, according to the works of Hannes Alfven (http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/people/alfven.html)mentioned in Lehrner’s “The Big Bang Never Happened” ISBN 067974049X ).

The observed effects of solar flares through earth’s magnetic field, and auroras at the poles, also manifest themselves through high voltage distribution overloads in certain areas due to these high energy/radiation “bursts”. As the Earth rotates and revolves around the sun at great speed, a portion of the aether is polarized (is “rigidified” by “rapidly varying electrostatic forces” emitted by the Earth) and carried along by the electric field of the Earthwhich decreases with the inverse square of the distance from the Earth. Tesla measured these electrostatic emissions with a particular partially evacuated tube which he could orient as desired and watch the wave patterns change shape.

Here come into play the “tubes of force” (Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Maxwell, J.J. Thomson) that – due to independent charge ratio depending on density and electrical content – are absorbed by bodies and impart a downward momentum (thus “gravity” is a downward push, not a pull) creating the sensation of a “gravity field“. It is the interaction between the electrical content of every “dynamic” body with aether carriers (comprising tubes of force) that results in momentum being imparted to a body (an electromagnetic to mechanical interconversion). It is an endless “circuit loop” that continuously keeps everything in motion in our universe (Tesla’s “Wheelwork of Nature”) which if understood can give the ability to achieve “any desired result“.

This “carrier exchange” is constant, but can be artificially manipulated using high voltage direct current brush and appropriate high voltage high frequency alternating current potentials in order to block or reduce it. Every moving body in our universe transverses this omni-directional radiation and interacts with the aether since all media have electrical content. The important fact is that the aether can convert the weaker, mechanical force, to the much stronger electromagnetic one. This holds the key to increasing “work” over a period of time. This exchange is constantly occurring in our universe and is it’s unlimited “prime mover“.

Was on Massive Attack’s concert today. And was massively attacked. Great concert not only because of their music (i like very much from their beginnings) and visual effects but because their concert had a message. Clear message. As there were a lot of meaningful words rolling on a big screen behind about war, all articles for impeachment of J.W. Bush, prisoners without a trial, quotes about freedom and democracy (No man is above the law and no man below it) the whole message can be summed up: “Fear is not a natural state of civilized people.”(Aung San Suv Kyi)” People have to be aware what is going on, have to think, have to be critical toward democracy preachers otherwise other will think instead of them. Fear paralyses, fear change brain’s gray matter, puts you into inferior position,…

Not talking about normal human response on adrenalin rush; i am talking about damaging effect of constant, invisible, omnipotently present fear without a real bases, which we are hearing about through media every day. Either terrorism or global warming or damaging diseases or god… They might attack you at the moment you expect the least, so be rather afraid. Very afraid. Constant fear makes you run instead of fight. (see 2. The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear of Adam Curtis)

There is a lot of them who are more than willing to comfort you but for some return. Like exchange of true freedom for fake freedom. Like putting your worries into their hands to take care of them. As quote from Massive Attack’s big screen says: “Freedom is never free.”

Like this guys who have the power to rise the awareness among masses accompanied with great music. It’s a food for emotions and mind.

Watched lately documentary Secret rulers of the world and if the half of what they’re saying is true, than this world is scary place for a living. But if people don’t know they take everything as granted.

Reminded me on very good Paul Auster ‘s book In The Century of last Thing. A world, narrowed to pure survival, trapped into corrupted system which imprisoned people. It’s a good portrait of devastation of either outher or inner person’s world. Once you are within the system, the possibility to escape is limited almost to zero. The only thought to keep you alive is that there , outside this system is another world, better one, the one you still keep in your memories. Or the one your desperate hope has built.

In In the Country of Last Things Paul Auster offers a haunting picture of a devastated world – futuristic world – but one which chillingly shadows our own. – Faber and Faber.

I could be yours
We can unwind
All these have flaws
All these have flaws

You’d agree it’s a typical high
You fly as you watch your name go by
And once the name goes by
Not thicker than water nor thicker than mud
And the eight k thuds it does

Sunset so thickly
Let’s make it quiet and quickly
Don’t frown
It taste’s better on the way back down

I could be yours
We can unwind
All these have flaws
All these have flaws
All these have flaws
Will lead to mine

We can unwind
All these have flaws
All these have flaws
Will lead to mine
Will see to
All these have flaws
All these have flaws
Will see to
All these have flaws
Will lead to mine
We can unwind all our flaws
We can unwind all our flaws

Movie deals with tricking nature of two basic corner stones of our mind: memory and imagination. Invented past as anchor for future. But lately research shows that the same brain structures are responsible for memories and imagination. And that believing can be seeing – Context Dictates What We Believe We See. Pretty visionary movie though.

“You might look at it as mental time travel–the ability to take thoughts about ourselves and project them either into the past or into the future,” says Kathleen McDermott, Ph.D. and Washington University psychology professor. The team used “functional magnetic resonance imaging” — or fMRI — to “see” brain activity. They asked college students to recall past events and then envision themselves experiencing such an event in their future. The results? Similar areas of the brain “lit up” in both scenarios.

Researchers say besides furthering their understanding of the brain — the findings may help research into amnesia, a curious psychiatric phenomenon. In addition to not being able to remember the past, most people who suffer from amnesia cannot envision or visualize what they’ll be doing in the future — even the next day.”

Another good article, posted in Scientific American Mind, uses Memento to explain the nature of memory.

The Matrix in Your Head

In the 2001 suspense thriller Memento, the lead character, Lenny, suffers a brain injury that makes him unable to remember events for longer than a minute or so. This type of amnesia, known as anterograde amnesia, is well known to neurologists and neuropsychologists. Like Lenny, sufferers remember events from their life histories that occurred before their injuries, but they cannot form lasting memories of anything that occurs afterward. As far as they recall, their personal histories ended shortly before the onset of their disorders.

The cause of Lenny’s problem was probably damage to his hippocampus, a pair of small, deep-brain structures crucial to memory—and also important to some of today’s most exciting and consequential neuroscience research. Decades of research have made clear that the hippocampus and surrounding cortex do more than just place our life events in time. The hippocampus, along with a newly discovered set of cells known as grid cells in the nearby cortex, traces our movement through space as well. And by doing so, it supplies a rich array of information that provides a context in which to place our life’s events. The picture that is emerging is of historic importance and more than a little beauty.

Exactly how does the brain create and store autobiographical memories? Although that question has fascinated scientists, philosophers and writers for centuries, it was only 50 years ago that scientists identified a brain area clearly necessary for this task—the hippocampus. The structure’s role was made clear in 1953, when William Scoville, a Hartford, Conn., surgeon seeking to relieve the epileptic seizures that were threatening to kill a patient known as H.M., removed most of H.M.’s hippocampus and discovered he had rendered him unable to form new, conscious memories. Since then, the case of H.M., along with extensive animal research, has firmly established that the hippocampus acts as a kind of encoding mechanism for memory, recording the timeline of our lives.

In the 1970s another discovery inspired the theory that the hippocampus also encodes our movement through space. In 1971 John O’Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky, both then at University College London, found that neurons in the hippocampus displayed place-specific firing. That is, given “place cells,” as O’Keefe dubbed these hippocampal neurons, would briskly fire action potentials (the electrical impulses neurons use to communicate) whenever a rat occupied a specific location but would remain silent when the rat was elsewhere. Thus, each place cell fired for only one location, much as would a burglar alarm tied to a tile in a hallway. Similar findings have been reported subsequently in other species, including humans.

These remarkable findings led O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel, now at the University of Arizona, to propose that the hippocampus was the neural locus of a “cognitive map” of the environment. They argued that hippocampal place cells organize the various aspects of experience within the framework of the locations and contexts in which events occur and that this contextual framework encodes relations among an event’s different aspects in a way that allows later retrieval from memory. Yet a consensus is emerging that the hippocampus does somehow provide a spatial context that is vital to episodic memory. When you remember a past event, you remember not only the people, objects and other discrete components of the event but also the spatiotemporal context in which the event occurred, allowing you to distinguish this event from similar episodes with similar components. But How?

Despite intensive study, however, the precise mechanisms by which the hippocampus creates this contextual representation of memory have eluded scientists. A primary impediment was that we knew little about the brain areas that feed the hippocampus its information. Early work suggested that the entorhinal cortex, an area of cortex next to and just in front of the hippocampus, might encode spatial information in a manner similar to that of the hippocampus, though with less precision.

This view has now been turned upside down with the amazing discovery of a system of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex, described in a series of recent papers by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser and their colleagues. Unlike a place cell, which typically fires when a rat occupies a single, particular location, each grid cell will fire when the rat is in any one of many locations that are arranged in a stunningly uniform hexagonal grid—as if the cell were linked to a number of alarm tiles spaced at specific, regular distances. The locations that activate a given grid cell are arranged in a precise, repeating grid pattern composed of equilateral triangles that tessellate the floor of the environment.

Imagine arranging dozens of round dinner plates to cover a floor in their optimal packing density, such that every plate is surrounded by other, equidistant plates; this arrangement mimics the triggering pattern tied to any given grid cell. As the rat moves around the floor, a grid cell in its brain fires each time the rat steps near the center of a plate. Other grid cells, meanwhile, are associated with their own hexagonal gridworks, which overlap each other. Grids of neighboring cells are of similar dimensions but are slightlyoffset from one another.

These grid cells, conclude the Mosers and their co-workers, are likely to be key components of a brain mechanism that constantly updates the rat’s sense of its location, even in the absence of external sensory input. And they almost certainly constitute the basic spatial input that the hippocampus uses to create the highly specific, context-dependent spatial fi ring of its place cells.

This discovery is one of the most remarkable findings in the history of single-unit recordings of brain activity.

JAMES J. KNIERIM is associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, where he studies the role of the hippocampus and related brain structures in spatial learning

Its a full moon today. As a crab, water sign, i am highly addicted to it. Solstice Moon Illusion by NASA . “Sometimes you just can’t believe your eyes. This week is one of those times. On Wednesday night, June 18th, step outside at sunset and look around. You’ll see a giant form rising in the east. At first glance it looks like the full Moon. It has craters and seas and the face of a man, but this “moon” is strangely inflated. It’s huge! You’ve just experienced the Moon Illusion. ” (see also Experiment in Perception: The Ponzo Illusion and the Moon

Call it coincidence or not, but just today my life has been “strangely inflated”. New giant form is rising in my east ……..

Not sure either is illusion or not, but i did it, felt it, not just thought about…i was dare to be myself …. and it is the best intoxication you can ever have. Among so many fake selves real me.

No additional words needed cos vocabulary is pretty poor to explain it. But true, so much things have to be given up to get back, to feel you, your own self … But reward is overwhelming … It’s such a beautiful natural cycle…going with the flow and being surprised what life brings you next.

A sense of authenticity is one of our deepest psychological needs, and people are more hungry for it than ever. Even so, being true to oneself is not for the faint of heart.

It starts innocently enough, perhaps the first time you recognize your own reflection.

You’re not yet 2 years old, brushing your teeth, standing on your steppy stool by the bathroom sink, when suddenly it dawns on you: That foam-flecked face beaming back from the mirror is you.

You. Yourself. Your very own self.

It’s a revelation—and an affliction. Human infants have no capacity for self-awareness. Then, between 18 and 24 months of age, they become conscious of their own thoughts, feelings, and sensations—thereby embarking on a quest that will consume much of their lives. For many modern selves, the first shock of self-recognition marks the beginning of a lifelong search for the one “true” self and for a feeling of behaving in accordance with that self that can be called authenticity.

A hunger for authenticity guides us in every age and aspect of life. It drives our explorations of work, relationships, play, and prayer. Teens and twentysomethings try out friends, fashions, hobbies, jobs, lovers, locations, and living arrangements to see what fits and what’s “just not me.” Midlifersdeepen commitments to career, community, faith, and family that match their self-images, or feel trapped in existences that seem not their own. Elders regard life choices with regret or satisfaction based largely on whether they were “true” to themselves.

Questions of authenticity determine our regard for others, as well. They dominated the presidential primaries: Was Hillary authentic when she shed a tear in New Hampshire? Was Obama earnest when his speechwriters cribbed lines from a friend’s oration?

“Americans remain deeply invested in the notion of the authentic self,” says ethicist John Portmann of the University of Virginia. “It’s part of the national consciousness.”

It’s also a cornerstone of mental health. Authenticity is correlated withmany aspects of psychological well-being, including vitality, self-esteem, and coping skills. Acting in accordance with one’score self—a trait called self-determination—is ranked by some experts as one of three basic psychological needs, along with competence and a sense of relatedness.

Yet, increasingly, contemporary culture seems to mock the very idea that there is anything solid and true about the self. Cosmetic surgery, psychopharmaceuticals, and perpetual makeovers favor a mutable ideal over the genuine article. MySpace profiles and tell-all blogs carry the whiff of wishful identity. Steroids, stimulants, and doping transform athletic and academic performance. Fabricated memoirs become best-sellers. Speed-dating discounts sincerity. Amid a clutter of counterfeits, the core self is struggling to assert itself.

“It’s some kind of epidemic right now,” says Stephen Cope, author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. “People feel profoundly like they’re not living from who they really are, their authentic self, their deepest possibility in the world. The result is a sense of near-desperation.”

Just What Is Authenticity, Anyway?

Psychologists long assumed authenticity was something too intangible to measure objectively. Certainly Michael Kernis did when, around 2000, graduate student Brian Goldman approached him about making a study of individual differences in authenticity.

“I said, ‘Well, you can’t do that,'” recalls Kernis, a social psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, “because nobody thought you could.” But the two plunged ahead, reviewing several centuries’ worthof philosophical and psychological literature. They came up with a technical description of authenticity as “the unimpeded operation of one’s true or core self in one’s daily enterprise.”

Kernis and Goldman (now at Clayton State University) identified four separate and somewhat concrete components of authenticity that they could measure in a written test. The first, and most fundamental, is self-awareness: knowledge of and trust in one’s own motives, emotions, preferences, and abilities. Self-awareness encompasses an inventory of issues from the sublime to the profane, from knowing what food you like to how likely you are to quit smoking to whether you’re feeling anxious or sad.

Self-awareness is an element of the other three components as well. It’s necessary for clarity in evaluating your strengths and (more to the point) your weaknesses: acknowledging when you’ve flubbed a presentation or when your golf game is off, without resorting to denial or blame. Authenticity also turns up in behavior: It requires acting in ways congruent with your own values and needs, even at the risk of criticism or rejection. And it’s necessary for close relationships, because intimacy cannot develop without openness and honesty.

Kernisand Goldman have found that a sense of authenticity is accompanied by a multitude of benefits. People who score high on the authenticity profile are also more likely to respond to difficulties witheffective coping strategies, rather than resorting to drugs, alcohol, or self-destructive habits. They often report having satisfying relationships. They enjoy a strong sense of self-worth and purpose, confidence in mastering challenges, and the ability to follow through in pursuing goals.

Whether authenticity causes such psychological boons or results from them isn’t yet clear. But they suggest why people crave authenticity, as those low in authenticity are likely to be defensive, suspicious, confused, and easily overwhelmed.

The Invented Self

For one thing, pinning down the true self is increasingly difficult. Western philosophers have sought some pure and enduring touchstone of I-nessever since Socrates began interrogating the citizens of Athens. He famously asserted that the unexamined life is not worthliving—but left vague exactly what insights and actions such inquiry might yield. Aristotle later connected the fruits of self-reflection witha theory of authentic behavior that was not so much about letting your freak flag fly as about acting in accord with the “higher good,” which he regarded as the ultimate expression of selfhood.

Spiritual and religious traditions similarly equated authenticity and morality. In the wisdom traditions of Judaism, Portmann points out, “people do the right thing because they see it as an expression of their authentic selfhood.” In Christianity, the eternal soul is who you really, truly are; sinners are simply out of touch with their core selves. “The authentic human self is called to be much nobler than what you see on the streets,” Portmann says.

Enlightenment philosophers secularized ideas of selfhood, but it took the 20th century’s existentialists to question the idea that some original, actual, ultimate self resides within. To them, the self was not so much born as made. One’s choice of action creates the self—in Sartre’s words, “existence precedes essence.” For Heidegger and confreres, authenticity was an attitude: the project of embracing life, constructing meaning, and building character without fooling yourself that your so-called essence matters in any absolute, a priori sense.

There isn’t a self to know,” decrees social psychologist Roy Baumeisterof the University of Florida. Today’s psychologists no longer regard the self as a singular entity with a solid core. What they see instead is an array of often conflicting impressions, sensations, and behaviors. Our headspace is messier than we pretend, they say, and the search for authenticity is doomed if it’s aimed at tidying up the sense of self, restricting our identities to what we want to be or who we think we should be.

Increasingly, psychologists believe that our notion of selfhood needs to expand, to acknowledge that, as Whitman wrote, we “contain multitudes.” An expansive vision of selfhood includes not just the parts of ourselves that we like and understand but also those that we don’t. There’s room to be a loving mother who sometimes yells at her kids, a diffident cleric who laughs too loud, or a punctilious boss with a flask of gin in his desk. The authentic self isn’t always pretty. It’s just real.

We all have multiple layers of self and ever-shifting perspectives, contends psychiatrist Peter Kramer. Most of us would describe ourselves as either an introvert or an extrovert. Research shows that although we think of ourselves as one or the other (with a few exceptions), we are actually both, in different contexts. Which face we show depends on the situation. As Kramer puts it, “To which facet of experience must we be ‘true’?”

“Whether there is a core self or not, we certainly believe that there is,” says social psychologist Mark Leary of Duke University. And the longing to live from that self is real, as is the suffering of those who feel they aren’t being true to themselves. Feelings of inauthenticitycan be so uncomfortable that people resort to extreme measures to bring their outer lives in alignment with their inner bearings. Portmann notes that people who undergo sex-change operations or gastric-bypass surgeries will say of their new gender or clothing size, “This is who I really am. I’m myself at last.” People who experience religious conversion often voice the same conviction, he says.

Likewise, “patients who recover from depression will say, ‘I’m back to myself again,'” reports Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac. “You can make the case that people are sometimes able to be more authentic on medication than not.”

But most of us experience inauthenticityless dramatically, as vague dissatisfaction, a sense of emptiness, or the sting of self-betrayal. If you’ve ever complimented the chef on an inedible meal, interviewed for a job you hoped you wouldn’t get, or agreed withyour spouse just to smooth things over, you know the feeling.

Inauthenticity might also be experienced on a deeper level as a loss of engagement in some—or many—aspects of your life. At the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he often teaches, Stephen Cope opens his programs by asking attendees to reveal their deepest reason for being there. “Eighty percent of the time, people say some variation of: ‘I’m here to find my true self, to come home to my true self,’ ” he reports. That response is as likely to come from young adults struggling to build careers and relationships as from people in midlife reevaluating their choices. “They say, ‘Who am I? Now that I’ve had a decent career and bought a house and had a marriage, I’m still feeling profoundly unfulfilled.'”

Another reason we’re not always true to ourselves is that authenticity is not for the faint of heart. There is, Kernis and Goldman acknowledge, a “potential downside of authenticity.” Accurate self-knowledge can be painful. When taking a test, it isn’t always fun to find out where you score on the grading curve. “Our self-images can be highly biased,” Leary notes. “But in the long run, accuracy is almost always better than bias.”

Behaving in accord withyour true self may also bring on the disfavor of others: Must you admit to being a Democrat when meeting with your conservative clients? Does your wife really want to know whether you like her new dress? “Opening oneself up to an intimate makes one vulnerable to rejection or betrayal,” Kernis and Goldman observe. It can feel better to be embraced as an impostor than dumped for the person you really are.

Authenticity also requires making conscious, informed choices based on accurate self-knowledge. Like the existentialists, today’s psychologists emphasize the role of active choice in creating an authentic life: a willingness to evaluate nearly everything that you do. That’s no mean feat in a culture where even simple acts—you can dye your hair any color you want, your television carries more than 500 channels, and Starbucks advertises more than 87,000 ways to enjoy a cup of coffee—require conscious consideration among alternatives.

Such freedom can be exhausting. Baumeister has found that deliberation, no matter how trivial, exacts a cost in psychic energy, of which we have only a finite amount. His studies show that authentic action demands a certain amount of psychological exertion that depletes the self’s executive function. “It’s harder to be authentic,” he says. “It takes more work.”

Leary sees it as an outright burden, part of the perennial longing and doubt that he calls “the curse of the self.” So here we are, stuck with our self-awareness, which also compels us to continually define and refine our sense of ourselves as unique individuals against a background of conformity, superficiality, exhibitionism, and lots of other unique individuals.

But wait, there’s more. In order to realize an authentic life, says Kernis, one often has to set aside hedonic well-being—the kind of shallow, short-lived pleasure we get from, say, acquiring things—for eudaimonic well-being, a deeper, more meaningful state in which gratification is not usually immediate. Sissies need not apply.

The fact is that we tend to flourish under the most challenging circumstances, and enduring the pain and confusion that often accompany them can bring out the best—and most authentic—in us, fostering such deeply satisfying qualities as wisdom, insight, and creativity. But our cultural climate is filled with an alluring array of distractions, from online gambling to video games, that often turn out to be junk food for the mind.

Too Rigid for Our Own Good

But the really hard work, according to Cope and others, is the amount of ego-wrangling required to contact the core self. One of the biggest barriers to authentic behavior, he says, is the arbitrary and rigid self-image that so many of us nurture but which in fact distorts experience and limits self-knowledge. “Oftentimes, the very first line of defense you get with the folks who say, ‘I’m leading an inauthentic life,’ is that they’re living life according to a fixed set of views and beliefs about how they should be.”

A man at a dinner party admits that he married his first wife “because, well, you have to get married sometime, right?” (Actually, you don’t.) A composer who sets music to blockbuster films complains that they are too commercial, but is unwilling to forego such movies’ wide audiences and big paychecks for work on more meaningful projects. In each case, the individual may be guided by unexamined assumptions about what constitutes responsibility, satisfaction, even success.

Kernis contends that we each acquire a mixed set of shoulds, oughts, and have-to’s while still too young to process them. They are neither fully conscious nor deeply considered but are acquired through convention and the expectations of others. Getting beyond these arbitrary strictures often demands the kind of soul-searching that most of us put off or avoid entirely. In fact, much of the work that people do in cognitive and behavioral therapy is to hold such beliefs up to the light and examine where they came from, a necessary step to resolving the anxiety or depression they typically create and that drive people to seek help.

“Jung says the first thing you should do is take a look at those things that are dark in you, the things that are problematical, that you don’t like,” says psychotherapist and former monk Thomas Moore, author of A Life at Work. “You have to be willing to look at things that don’t fit snugly into the image you have of what you would like to be.”

Failures R Us

Becoming authentic, then, means accepting not only contradiction and discomfort but personal faults and failures as well. Problematic aspects of our lives, emotions, and behaviors—the times we’ve yelled at the kids, lusted after the babysitter, or fallen back on our promises to friends—are not breaches of your true self, Moore insists. They’re clues to the broader and more comprehensive mystery of selfhood. “In fact,” he notes, “we are all very subtle and very complex, and there are forces and resources within us that we have no control over. We will never find the limits of who we are.

“People carry around a heavy burden of not feeling authentic,” he says, “because they have failed marriages and their work life hasn’t gone the way it should, and they’ve disappointed everybody, including themselves. When people think of these as just failures, as opposed to learning experiences, they don’t have to feel the weight of their lives or the choices they’ve made. That disowning creates a division that becomes the sense of inauthenticity.”

Kernis’ studies show that people witha sense of authenticity are highly realistic about their performance in everything from a game of touch football to managing the family business. They’re not defensive or blaming of others when they meet with less success than they wanted.

Eastern spiritual traditions have long furnished ways to glimpse the messiness of the self, and to view with detachment the vicissitudes of mind and emotion that roil human consciousness. Buddhism takes the self in all its variability as the principal subject of contemplation; the yogic tradition accords self-study great importance.

The Hindu Bhagavad Gitasuggests we also have a duty to act: to realize our full potential in the world, to construct or discover a unique individuality, and thereby to live authentically. You have to “discern your own highly idiosyncratic gifts, and your own highly idiosyncratic calling,” Cope elaborates. “Real fulfillment comes from authentically grappling with the possibility inside you, in a disciplined, concentrated, focused way.”

That lesson isn’t confined to Eastern spirituality. In The Way of Man, philosopher Martin Buber relates a Hasidic parable about one Rabbi Zusya, a self-effacing scholar who has a deathbed revelation that he shares with the friends keeping vigil at his side. “In the next life, I shall not be asked: ‘Why were you not more like Moses?'” he says. “I shall be asked: ‘Why were you not more like Zusya?'”

Instead of being depressed living in a bad movie i rather watched very good one. V for Vendeta (2005) is worth to see movie. If i did something else and I’d just have listened the voices, some parts sound like listening major TV networks lately. Terrorists attack, TV propaganda, frighten people, fear, power, prisons, …

Overall, movie is very good and is a good metaphor of our current situation. Some romantic elements doesn’t hurt either. Movie is directed by James McTeigue and written by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski (Matrix). At the end movie with some quotes, slow motion visual effects and martial (knifes) arts reminds of Matrix. In good sense, of course. Natalie Portman as Evey is good as always. Still like the most her play in Leon (which is amazing movie) and in Goya’s Ghosts she played very well too.

Hugo Weaving – V. (Smith from Matrix) gave soul to V. And i liked play of Finch (Stephen Rea ) . i liked his play in The Crying game by Neil Jordan a lot. The Crying game was my fav movie for a long time. And as in The Crying game he realises and accepts at the end –or as he says in V for Vendetta: “I can see it now. We are part of the same pattern. We are all trapped in. “

Origin of the film:

V for Vendetta is a ten-issue comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated mostly by David Lloyd, set in a dystopian future United Kingdom imagined from the 1980s about the 1990s. A mysterious anarchist named “V” works to destroy the totalitarian government, profoundly affecting the people he encounters.

“[The movie] has been “turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country… It’s a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives—which is not what the comic V for Vendetta was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England.”

What ever were their dispute, I do like a movie and all its hidden messages and i also do appreciate Moore’s visionary story. Or as it says in the movie:

V: Your own father said that artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

My last movie trip was tought. For a brain. To digest this injustice which is mostly hidden to “civilised world”. The Constant Gardener, Invisible Children and The Kite Runner (thanks to oceanshaman for a tip) have one thing in common. Stolen lives, childhood, hope and dignity. Of the whole generations, continents,.. People and kids as collateral damage of power play. Yet every human being has heart and soul, so many dreams, love and hopes within,…are those hope and dreams less worth than western ones? How can we talk about high level of moral values, humanism and scientific achievements our civilisation has built if small part of human race use other majority as a tool for their own well being? People as predators.

As Baba in The Kite Runner says: “No matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. (..) When you kill a man, you steal a life. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see?”

The Constant Gardener is a story of African poverty, ruthless exploitation of continent and people in order to maximaze corporations’ profits (in this case Pharmaceutical colonialism), with underlying beautiful love story beetwen Justin and Tessa (Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz). Movie is based on John le Carre’s novel The Constant Gardener. (Trivia: Le Carré published an essay entitled “The United States has gone mad” in The Times in January 2003, protesting against the war in Iraq, saying: “How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history.”)

Movie is directed by Fernando Meirelles who directed also Cidade de Deus – City of God . Stunning pictures of landscape and sensitive portrait of suffering and survival of African people who are desparately waiting for leftovers from rich man’s table. So sad.

At the end of the movie Justin run from rebels who are stealing children. Wanted to know more about, i found documentary INVISIBLE CHILDREN , which really shocked me. Still have picture of those fearful and fearless kids in my head. Made me think how i can help. Cos if this documentary doesn’t move something within people than we are the ones whom this civilisation has stolen the soul not just to African people. Kids as a weapon, kids with weapon (5-12 years old, reminds me on City of God); fearless trained small killing machines. Ruthless power of tribes, fueled by corrupted governments, financed by multinationals and U.N. with the purpose to further exploit African land and people.

See this shocking video and spread the word…

And see the role of US, U.N. and Russia in Africa. Unbelievable! (have African people ever had a possibility to decide for themselves)

And it’s getting even nastier. See some article bellow on which big media mostly don’t pay attention but are crucial to understand what is really going on.

In early February 2007 the White House finally announced a presidential directive to establish by September 2008 a new unified combatant command with an area of responsibility (AOR) solely dedicated to the African continent. While there had been chatter and debate over a period of years about the form that such a military command should take, the announcement to proceed with centralizing military resources in Africa should not have surprised anyone paying attention for the past seven years

Big drug companies are conducting clinical trials in Africa with no consideration for ethics, the health of patients or the relevance of the drugs to the needs and the pathology of the continent. Nobody is testing traditional medicine to see if it works, and how.

The new plan of the European Union to have economic agreements with her former colonies has not received much attention in terms of critical analysis especially by the civil society groups and trade union movements. The agreement represents another way of rapaciously and legally exploiting the resources of the third world countries especially Africa where most of the population are living in absolute poverty. In the first place, the goods to be exported to European countries are mostly agricultural produce with little local content and market value while European countries will bring in finished goods which are high valued. This definitely means the continuous underdevelopment of the third world countries. Therefore, there will continuously be wide technology gap, increased trade imbalance and capital flight from the countries.

“Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable result of free-market theory,” Schmidt told more than 150 attendees. Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program was similar in many ways to slavery, but explained that just as “compassionate conservatism” has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized countries, full stewardry, or “compassionate slavery,” could be a similar boon to developing ones.

With current US politics the future for Afghanistan, Iraq, etc seems no different than African ones. Permanent presence of troops, suportof their corrupted governments and juntas which empowers constant civil wars will leave the countries robed of natural resources, diminishing of local culture and people without a future.

After six years of US-led military support and billions of pounds in aid, security in Afghanistan is “deteriorating” and President Hamid Karzai’s government controls less than a third of the country, America’s top intelligence official has admitted.Mike McConnell testified in Washington that Karzai controls about 30% of Afghanistan and the Taliban 10%, and the remainder is under tribal control.

The Afghan government angrily denied the US director of national intelligence’s assessment yesterday, insisting it controlled “over 360” of the country’s 365 districts. “This is far from the facts and we completely deny it,” said the defence ministry.

But the gloomy comments echoed even more strongly worded recent reports by thinktanks, including one headed by the former Nato commander General James Jones, which concluded that “urgent changes” were required now to “prevent Afghanistan becoming a failed state”.

“ScienceDaily – Feb. 19, 2008— Scientists at UCL (University College London) have found the link between what we expect to see, and what our brain tells us we actually saw. The study reveals that the context surrounding what we see is all important —sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things which aren’t really there.”

“By Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. MacknikIt’s a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is actually a figment of our imagination. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world. Of course, many experiences in daily life reflect the physical stimuli that enter the brain. But the same neural machinery that interprets actual sensory inputs is also responsible for our dreams, delusions and failings of memory. In other words, the real and the imagined share a physical source in the brain. So take a lesson from Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.””

Bellow video September 11 clues is a good example to test the theory. Some people claim that attack by planes on WTC never happened. And zillions of videos and pictures repeated over and over again where we saw that the planes were there…hit WTC. What is true? Shall we believe to Bush (see video below)…repeat over and over again …you got to catapult the propaganda ?!?! If bellow movie would be repeated so many times as official ones what would people believe than? Did people see or they’ve been told what to see.

I don’t wanna judge. Both could be real or no-one of them. But i can doubt …either on this video, official one or on both on them… That is the privilege of the observer … Worked on commercial TV, I’ve learned one thing: Frequency sell (either talking about news or commercials). Brains functions are result of evolution in order to successfully adapt the environment. Many times brain simplifies, generalize, categorize …among zillions of stimulus. The stimulus (either true or not–brain actually doesn’t care) which is the most dominant, become anchor for the whole category. PR or advertising guys know this wery well.

Republicans, Lakoff says, understand how “brains and minds work”. If voters are fthinkers and not thinkers, you need to appeal to their emotions. One way to do so is to hitch a ride on a narrative that is already neurally well honed. Some narratives – for example, “rags to riches” – are affective neural superhighways for Americans.

.

Psychologists have found that thought patterns used to recall the past and imagine the future are strikingly similar.

“Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to show the brain at work, they have observed the same regions activated in a similar pattern whenever a person remembers an event from the past or imagines himself in a future situation. This challenges long-standing beliefs that thoughts about the future develop exclusively in the frontal lobe.”

Watched before both his other movies Basquiat (Jean-Michel Basquiat is “discovered” by Andy Warhol’s art world and becomes a star) and Before Night Falls (life of Cuban poet and novelist, Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), but for me The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is definitely his best. Makes you think after the movie and some scenes come as flash back after you. From the beginning the movie pulls you into main actor’s head and it doesn’t let you go till the end. Schnabel as neo-expressionist” artist/painter brings into his movie excellent visual aesthetic dimension which is missed in many modern movies. Poetical and inspirational. Sensitive photography of deep inner space. Art in motion pictures. Art of flow of words. Must see art.

The story of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: “Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he’d only visited in his mind.”

From www.Salon.com: “The quietly stunning film of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s phenomenal memoir, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” was nominated for four Oscars this year. They include directing by Julian Schnabel— an honor he won for the film at the Cannes Film Festival and Golden Globes — and best adapted screenplay by Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar in 2002 for his adaptation “The Pianist.” “

There is every reason for the film’s success. It recounts the remarkable life of Bauby, the debonair editor of French Elle magazine who in 1995 suffered a massive stroke. He slipped into a coma that lasted 20 days and awoke to find himself paralyzed from head to toe. He was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder called locked-in syndrome.

A prisoner inside his useless body, Bauby, 43, could think and reason, smell and hear (though not well). With the only part of his body that he could move — his left eye — he could see and later learn to express himself. His speech therapist and later his friends would read him an alphabet, and Bauby would blink at the letter he wanted. He formed words, phrases and sentences, and ultimately, over the course of two months, working with ghostwriter Claude Mendibil, who took down word for word what he said, he completed his memoir.

The evocative title comes from Bauby’s notion that while his body was submerged and weighted down — impossible to move — his imagination and memory were still free and as light as a butterfly’s wings: “My cocoon becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.”A few days after the book was published to rave reviews in March 1997, Bauby died of an infection.

Released last spring, the film is a visual knockout. Schnabel draws on Bauby’s fantasies to blast moviegoers with a kaleidoscope of dreamy images — some subtle, some banging loud — and an array of captivating music and sounds. The wonderful script takes the point of view of Bauby himself. The fourth wall between the audience and film has fallen away and the audience experiences the world through his eyes.”

=====================================================

Beautiful music from the movie: La Mer. Charles Trénet

If memories and imagination use the same brain structures, for me as a “sea” person this music and pictures and memories and imagination related to could immediately overheat them 🙂

It’s not realy so innocent what going on with our …human mind… how much politics or this neocons games effect our brains….memories, hormons, endorphines…will post next how real and imagined is close and what we see is what we get …

This suggests that really bad experiences may have lasting effects on the brain, even in healthy people,” said Barbara Ganzel, the study’s lead researcher and postdoctoral fellow at Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.

ScienceDaily -Jun. 4, 2008 — Healthy adults who were close to the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, have less gray matter in key emotion centers of their brains compared with people who were more than 200 miles away, finds a new Cornell study.

The study — one of the first to look at the effects of trauma on the brains of healthy adults — is published in the April issue of Neurolmage. It follows a Cornell study by the same authors that found people living near the World Trade Center on 9/11 have brains that are more reactive to such emotional stimuli as photographs of fearful faces. Combined, the two studies provide an emerging picture of what happens in the brains of healthy people who experience a traumatic event.

The smaller volume of gray matter — composed largely of cells and capillary blood vessels — that Ganzel found were in areas that process emotion and may be, Ganzel suggests, the brain’s normal response to trauma. The subjects in the study did not suffer from any mental or physical health disorders. Gray matter, a major component of the nervous system, is composed of the neuron cell bodies that process information in the brain.

About half of Americans experience a trauma in their lifetime, and scientists know a lot about the effects of trauma on the brains of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but not about people without clinical disorders. And most people, Ganzel said, who experience a trauma don’t get PTSD.

Key brain areas that are smaller are also more responsive to threat, said Ganzel, suggesting that these changes may be a helpful response to living in an uncertain environment.

“We have known for a long time that trauma exposure can lead to subsequent vulnerability to mental health disorders years after the trauma,” Ganzel added. “This research gives us clues about the biology underlying that vulnerability.”

The researchers used two types of magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 18 people who were within 1.5 miles of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and compared them to scans of 18 people who lived at least 200 miles away at the time. One type showed the gray matter volume, and the other showed the brain’s response to emotional stimuli (pictures of fearful and calm faces). Those who were close to the disaster on Sept. 11 showed more emotional reactivity in the amygdala, a brain area that detects the presence of threatening information.

Combining the brain data revealed that those who were near the World Trade Center had smaller, more reactive amygdalas, and this, in turn, was related to how anxious they were years later. Several other brain regions associated with emotion processing were also smaller in those who were close to the disaster.

The researchers also found that study subjects who had experienced other types of trauma (violent crimes, sudden death of a loved one) showed a similar reduction in gray matter and similar response to emotional faces and anxiety.

“This suggests that the differences we see in the brain and behavior of people who were near the Sept. 11 disaster are not specific to that one event,” Ganzel said. “And it turns out there is a very similar pattern of gray matter volume loss with normal aging, which raises the question of what role trauma plays in the aging brain.”

Adapted from materials provided by Cornell University. Original article written by Sheri Hall.

Magnetic resonance imaging of the brains of healthy adults more than three years after Sept. 11, 2001, shows areas that have less gray matter volume in those who were near ground zero on 9/11, compared with those who were much farther away. This is three views of the brain areas that have lower gray matter volume in the 9/11-exposed group. Notably, all of these areas (which show up brighter in this image) are associated with the processing of emotion. (Credit: Image courtesy of Cornell University)

ScienceDaily (May 8, 2007) — According to a new brain study, even people who seemed resilient but were close to the World Trade Center when the twin towers toppled on Sept. 11, 2001, have brains that are more reactive to emotional stimuli than those who were more than 200 miles away

That is the finding of a new Cornell study that excluded people who did not have such mental disorders as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression. One of the first studies to look at the effects of trauma on the brains of healthy people, it is published in the May issue of the journal Emotion.

“These people appear to be doing okay, but they may, indeed, be having more sensitive responses to upsetting stimuli,” said Elise Temple, a co-author and assistant professor of human development at Cornell.

More than half the population experiences trauma, which makes people more likely to develop PTSD, depression, anxiety and physical illness later in life, according to other studies. Also, trauma has been found to make the brain’s emotional processing centers — particularly the amygdalae, the parts of the brain that judge emotional intensity and make emotional memories — more sensitive in cases of PTSD.

The findings suggest that events that trigger shock, fear and horror that are within a normal range — may cause similar changes in the brain that traumas do. Victims may experience lingering symptoms (bad dreams, jumpiness, thinking about the incident and avoiding the site of the trauma), but they are not severe. However, the kinds of changes that these traumas cause in the brain, the researchers suspect, create vulnerability to developing future mental disorders.

Specifically, the Cornell researchers found that three years after Sept. 11, 2001, the amygdalae were most sensitive in those who were close to the World Trade Center. These individuals tended to still experience lingering symptoms that were not severe enough to be diagnosed as a mental disorder. Those with lingering symptoms showed significantly more sensitive emotional reactions in the brain when stimulated by photographs of fearful faces.

“Our study suggests that there may be long-term neural correlates of trauma exposure, even in people who have looked resilient,” said lead author Barbara Ganzel, Cornell M.S. ’99, Ph.D. ’02, a postdoctoral researcher in human development at Cornell. “Up until now, there has been very little evidence of that.”

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to see how people’s brains responded to photographs of fearful versus calm faces, the scans of 11 people who were within 1.5 miles of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, were compared with those who were living more than 200 miles away at the time; none of the subjects had psychiatric disorders.

“We know that looking at fearful faces in normal adults tends to activate the amygdalae relative to looking at neutral faces,” said Ganzel. “So we were looking to see if people who have had a very bad experience would have more response to this relatively mild everyday stimulus.”

Indeed, the amygdalae of those who were close to the twin towers were significantly more activated than that of others, even when other factors were controlled for in the analysis.

“People who had experienced traumas that left them with more lingering symptoms were the ones who had higher activity in their fear centers,” said Temple. “We think that the World Trade Center experience was traumatic enough that it left them with hyperactive amygdalae.”

Other co-authors include B.J. Casey, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at the Weill Cornell Medical College; Henning Voss, a physicist at the CitiGroup Biomedical Imaging Center in New York City, where the fMRI scanning took place; and Gary Glover of Stanford University, who developed the fMRI techniques used.

It’s just amazing how history repeats itself and how the agenda of leading elite is the same. Election are near and people should be conditioned as Pavlov’s dog. Not afraid enough…we gonna increase electroshock slightly. All current events confirm even more the facts presented in Adam Curtis documentary : The Power of Nightmares -The Rise of the politics of Fear. And its amazing to read how the same vocabulary is used now for Iran as was before for Iraq (See below)

RUMSFELD: That’s what I was just going to say. This President’s pretty much a victim of success. We haven’t had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it’s not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing’s in Europe, there’s a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack. And when that happens, then everyone gets energized for another [inaudible] and it’s a shame we don’t have the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats…the lethality, the carnage, that can be imposed on our society is so real and so present and so serious that you’d think we’d be able to understand it, but as a society, the longer you get away from 9/11, the less…the less…

Iran’s nuclear programme has made big strides in recent months and the country is on course to pass an important threshold for nuclear weapons capability next year, scientists and analysts say.

Ever since Iran started enriching uranium in defiance of United Nations resolutions, western diplomats have highlighted the technological obstacles facing the country, arguing that they provided time to deal with the dispute over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Hayden warned, however, that progress in Iraq is being undermined by increasing interference by Iran, which he accused of supplying weapons, training and financial assistance to anti-U.S. insurgents. While declining to endorse any particular strategy for dealing with Iran, he described the threat in stark terms.

“It is the policy of the Iranian government, approved at the highest levels of that government, to facilitate the killing of American and other coalition forces in Iraq. Period,” he said.

The US Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) says a new al-Qaeda video has urged the use of nuclear and chemical weapons against the West.

“FBI had sent an alert to US law enforcement agencies about the video. “We got information the tape was coming,” said Kolko. “We sent out an alert to law enforcement to let them know the tape was coming.” The latest video, purportedly released by al-Qaeda, has not been authenticated. “

As of early this evening, ABC News and the Drudge Report are running a headline claiming that “al Qaeda operatives will post a new video on the Internet in the next 24 hours, calling for what one source said is ‘jihadists to use biological, chemical and nuclear weapons to attack the West.’” The ABC News report quotes FBI spokesman Richard Kolko as acknowledging that “there have been several reports that al Qaeda will release a new message calling for the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against civilians.”

For the record: there is no indication whatsoever that Al-Qaida’s As-Sahab Media Foundation is preparing to release anything in the next 24 hours. There has been no notification posted on the usual channels, there are no glitzy advertisements, and there is no credible electronic chatter, period. Rather, the intel community appears to have (once again) fallen victim to poorly researched open source news reporting. In recent days, several fringe media organizations have published stories about a video recording posted by anonymous Al-Qaida miscreants on extremist Internet chat forums.

Hayden warned, however, that progress in Iraq is being undermined by increasing interference by Iran, which he accused of supplying weapons, training and financial assistance to anti-U.S. insurgents. While declining to endorse any particular strategy for dealing with Iran, he described the threat in stark terms.

“It is the policy of the Iranian government, approved at the highest levels of that government, to facilitate the killing of American and other coalition forces in Iraq. Period,” he said.

CNN’s Paula Newton reports of a possible terror threat to the Euro 2008 Championship in Switzerland and Austria.

===============================

And here you can see the easons:

==================================

Before attack on Iraq:

“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

“Initially, I thought when he said, ‘There aren’t enough targets in– in Afghanistan,’ I thought he was joking.

“I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we’ve looked at this issue for years. For years we’ve looked and there’s just no connection.”

Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’

“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.”

Three weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime by force, but also overturning the regimes in Iran, Syria, and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively by former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith

in his recently published account of Iraq War decisions.Feith’s retelling further indicates that this aggressive U.S. aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country’s top military leaders.

Feith’s book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, released in April, provides excerpts of a paper that Rumsfeld sent to President George W. Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, but rather on the aim of establishing “new regimes” in a series of states by “aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism.”

Quoting that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase “some other states” in brackets. In a related Pentagon “campaign plan” document, the Taliban and Iraq are listed as “state regimes” against which “plans and operations” might be mounted, yet the names of four other states are blacked out “for security reasons.”

In his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars, Gen. Wesley Clark, who commanded the NATO bombing campaign in the Kosovo War, recalled being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that states that Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia.

“In January 1998, PNAC published an open letter to President Clinton arguing that “containment” of Iraq “has been steadily eroding,” jeopardizing the region and, potentially, beyond. “Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate.” PNAC followed up a few months later with an open letter to Senate leader Trent Lott (R-MS) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich(R-GA), which argued that the “only way to protect the United States and its allies from the threat of weapons of mass destruction [is] to put in place policies that would lead to the removal of Saddam and his regime from power.” Signatories to these letters included many of those who signed PNAC’s statement of principles, as well as future realist-inclined Bush administration officials Richard Armitage and Robert Zoellick. Also in support of this effort, PNAC set up a meeting between Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, and Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, to argue the case for intervention (Dolan and Cohen, “The War about the War.”). Earlier, in February 1998, Wolfowitz had testified in front of the House International Relations Committee that regime change in Iraq was the “only way to rescue the region and the world from the threat” posed by Hussein. Revealing another aspect of neoconservative alliance-building in the years leading up to the Bush election, Wolfowitz added that the United States should recognize “a provisional government of free Iraq,” and that the best place to look for such a government was “with the current organization and principles of the Iraqi National Congress” (quoted in Halper and Clarke, pp. 101-102). Thus, write Halper and Clarke, “in only a few years since the Soviet collapse, neoconservatism had refocused itself as an interventionist lobby intent above all else on waging a second Gulf war” (p. 102).

The agenda items outlined in the statement reemerged in the wake of 9/11 in Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy, the seminal statement of the so-called Bush Doctrine. As described by leading international relations scholar Robert Jervis, the Bush Doctrine is composed of “a strong belief in the importance of a state’s domestic regime in determining its foreign policy and the related judgment that this is an opportune time to transform international politics; the perception of great threats that can be defeated only by new and vigorous policies, most notably preventive war; a willingness to act unilaterally when necessary; and, as both a cause and a summary of these beliefs, an overriding sense that peace and stability require the United States to assert its primacy in world politics” (quoted in Chris Dolan and David Cohen, “The War about the War: Iraq and the Politics of National Security Advising in the G.W. Bush Administration’s First Term,” March 2006). “

“In February 1998, Feith and many other high-profile neoconservatives and foreign policy hawks signed a letter to President Bill Clinton calling for a “comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime.” Among the signatories to the letter, which was produced by the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, were several people who would later be tagged to serve in the first administration of George W. Bush, including Feith, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Peter Rodman, John Bolton, and Dov Zakheim.

A Clean Break” also recommended “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq” and working closely with “Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll back” regional threats and using “Israeli proxy forces” based in Lebanon for “striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon.” If that should “prove insufficient, [Israel should strike] at select targets in Syria proper.” Further, “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, even rolling back Syria.” This would create a “natural axis” between Israel, Jordan, a Hashemite Iraq, and Turkey that “would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula.” This “could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East, which could threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.”

“The 2000 election of George W. Bushenabled PNAC to advance its agenda for the “New American Century.” Many PNAC principals moved into the Pentagon, vice president’s office, and State Department. It was not, however, until after 9/11 that the PNAC agenda was fast-forwarded.

On September 20, 2001, PNAC sent an open letter to Bush that commended his newly declared war on terrorism and urged him not only to target Osama bin Laden but also other supposed “perpetrators,” including Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah. The letter made one of the first arguments for regime change in Iraq as part of the war on terror. According to the PNAC letter, “It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”

“Main areas of current conservative dispute include immigration policy, stem cell research, levels of troop commitments in Iraq, democratization policy, Israel, and U.S. relations with China, North Korea, and Iran. Although the neocon camp and its allies, including Cheney’s foreign policy team, are all hardliners with respect to Iran, there are public differences about which groups should receive U.S. assistance. While the leading neocon figures on Iran policy, such as Michael Rubin and Kenneth Timmerman, oppose funding the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian resistance group with militants in Iraq, other players in the Iran policy debate, such as Raymond Tanter and the Iran Policy Committee, are MEK boosters.”

I can describe the movie the same as Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) starts the movie, explaining what dreams are:” Hi, and welcome back to another episode of “Télévision Educative”. Tonight, I’ll show you how dreams are prepared. People think it’s a very simple and easy process but it’s a bit more complicated than that. As you can see, a very delicate combination of complex ingredients is the key. First, we put in some random thoughts. And then, we add a little bit of reminiscences of the day… mixed with some memories from the past….” [adds two bunchs of pasta]. If i would have a gift to make a movies, i would do the same.

Movie is done as a dreams really are… in true Freudian sense. Bit of science, explained on a funny way, romance, blurred border between reality and imagination, dominance of inner world over external one, chaos theory, Parallel Synchronized Randomness, lots of creativity, emotions, real world versus artificial one… and mixed together into very very tasteful dish… Very surrealistic, like modern and funnier version of Bonuel’s An Andalusian Dog.

In spite of varying interpretations, Buñuel made clear throughout his writings that, between Dalí and himself, the only rule for the writing of the script was that “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.”[3] Moreover, he stated that, “Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis. Like Gondry says…MICHEL: No, I don’t believe in symbols. I have nothing to do with a book. You can define every image and symbol but it doesn’t mean it’s a symbol that’s universal. Like if you dream about a tree, it represents a penis? That’s bullshit. [Laughs]

Its great idea to use Stephane TV show as a position of an observer of his own events and emotions…just like in dreams where we remember our dreams as observers but we know that we were the main actor as well. … In science, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observing will make on the phenomenon being observed. For example, for us to “see” an electron, a photon must first interact with it, and this interaction will change the path of that electron. It is also theoretically possible for other, less direct means of measurement to affect the electron; even if the electron is simply put into a position where observing it is possible, without actual observation taking place, it will still (theoretically) alter its position.

Always amazed me that position: be actor and observer at the same time. But it is not only in dreams…we live the whole life as that…we think and act and feel, we observe our actions, thoughts and feelings, than correct them if they don’t fit into frame…as in Goundry’s Human nature, mouses are Pavlov’s conditioned to eat salad with knifes and forks at the table in order to civilised them. So principles are the same, just with different “rational” involvement.

Watched on Friday on Discovery Science documentary with the same title: The science of sleep. It dealt not what dreams are but with the basics: Why do we dream at all? Why do we need dreams? Dreams occur in REM phase, very funny presented in Goundry’s movie “My eyes walk in dreams”.REM sleep occurs in all mammals and birds. As it not known that animal have language structure (and all symbols categories due that); so dreams have to be very physiological need. Lots of theories have been done, but there is still no one way answer. Amazing…Phoenix has just sent pictures from Mars’s, but our brain is still so locked in mysteries.

Are dreams connected to short -term memories, categorizing emotions into symbols of language structure? Is dreaming like being schizophrenic, deprived from majority of external stimuli and building internal world with daily emotions and stored memories. What is the principle of reality cos everything is real for us while we are dreaming. What is the triger which switch at the end of dreams and tells us that was not real but dreams.

Are dreams and reality same continuum, not two different realities. Like earth’s night and day cycle, once more and once less directly exposed to sun of consciousness” And what is consciousness all about, cos in REM phase we feel, hear, talk, think,…same as in awake state. Are dreams our own reality built from personally acquired symbols cos anyone can understood only its own dreams. We are producer of dreams and their observer. As in movie, sometimes only director understand the symbols and meaning of them.

Rapid eye movement (REM) sleepis normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid movements of the eyes. Criteria for REM sleep include not only rapid eye movements, but also low muscle tone and a rapid, low voltage EEG. REM sleep in adult humans typically occupies 20-25% of total sleep, lasting about 90-120 minutes. A newborn baby spends more than 80% of total sleep time in REM. During REM, the summed activity of the brain’s neurons is quite similar to that during waking hours; for this reason, the phenomenon is often called paradoxical sleep. This means that there are no dominating brain waves during REM sleep. Most of our vividly recalled dreams occur during REM sleep.

REM and Near death experience & Out of body experience

“These findings suggest that REM state intrusion contributes to near death experiences,” said neurologist and study author Kevin R. Nelson, MD, FAAN, of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. “People who have near death experiences may have an arousal system that predisposes them to REM intrusion.”

Nelson said several other factors support this hypothesis. Several features of near death experiences are also associated with the REM state. For example, the feeling of being outside of one’s body has been associated with the REM state and the conditions of sleep paralysis, narcolepsy and seizures. The feeling of being surrounded by light could be based on the visual activity that occurs during the REM state, Nelson said. During the REM state, the muscles can lose their tone, or tension.”

REM Deprivation

ScienceDaily, Feb. 6, 2008— Four days’ exposure to a REM sleep deprivation procedure reduces cell proliferation in the part of the forebrain that contributes to long-term memory of rats, according to a new study.

The study, authored by Dennis McGinty, PhD, of the V.A. Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, focused on male Sprague-Dawley rats. REM sleep deprivation was achieved by a brief treadmill movement initiated by automatic online detection of REM sleep. A yoked-control (YC) rat was placed in the same treadmill and experienced the identical movement regardless of the stage of the sleep-wake cycle.

According to the results, REM sleep was reduced by 85 percent in REM sleep deprived rats and by 43 percent in YC rats. Cell proliferation was reduced by 63 percent in REM sleep deprived rats compared with YC rats. Across all animals, cell proliferation exhibited a positive correlation with the percentage of REM sleep.

“Several studies have shown that sleep contributes to brain plasticity in general, and to adult neurogenesis, in particular,” said Dr. McGinty. “Neurogenesis is a concrete example of brain plasticity, suppression of adult neurogenesis is thought to be important in pathologies such as depression. One current question has to do with the relative contribution of the two sleep states, non-REM and REM, which have very different, even opposite, physiological properties. This study showed that REM sleep has a critical role in facilitating brain plasticity. The study does not exclude an equally important role for non-REM sleep. In other recent work, we have shown that sleep fragmentation can also suppress adult neurogenesis. How sleep affects the molecular mechanisms underlying neurogenesis remains to be explored.”

The article “Rapid eye movement sleep deprivation contributes to reduction of neurogenesis in the hippocampal dentate gyrus of the adult rat” was published in the February 1 issue of the journal Sleep.

“But, when we looked in the sleep deprived subjects, instead, what we found is a hyperactive brain response,” he says.

And what’s more, in the sleep-deprived subjects, Walker discovered a disconnect between that over-reacting amygdala (a region of the brain) and the brain’s frontal lobe, the region that controls rational thought and decision-making, meaning that the subjects’ emotional responses were not being kept in check by the more logical seat of reasoning. It’s a problem also found in people with psychiatric disorders.

“So you’re saying that you take someone with a severe mental disorder and a person without that disorder, but deprive them of sleep, and the brain scan will look similar?” Stahl asks.

“Their pattern of brain activity was not dissimilar. So I think what it forces us to do really now is to appreciate more significantly the role that sleep may be playing in mental health and in psychiatric diseases. And I think that could be one of the futures of the field of sleep research,” Walker replies.

Walker says most of us need seven and a half to eight hours of sleep every night.”

=======================

FREUD RETURNS? LIKE A BAD DREAM

By J. Allan Hobson

Sigmund Freud’s views on the meaning of dreams formed the core of his theory of mental functioning. MarkSolms and others assert that brain imaging and lesion studies are now validating Freud’s conception of the mind. But similar scientific investigations show that major aspects of Freud’s thinking are probably

erroneous. For Freud, the bizarre nature of dreams resulted from an elaborate effortof the mind to conceal, by symbolic disguise and censorship, the unacceptable instinctual wishes welling up from the unconscious when the ego relaxes its prohibition of the id in sleep. But most neurobiological evidence supports thealternative view that dream bizarreness stems from normal changes in brain state. Chemical mechanisms in the brain stem, which shift the activation of various regions of the cortex, generate these changes. Many studies have indicated that the chemical changes determine the quality and quantity of dream visions, emotions and thoughts. Freud’s disguiseand-censorship notion must be discarded;no one believes that the ego-id struggle, ifit exists, controls brain chemistry. Mostpsychoanalysts no longer hold that the disguise-censorship theory is valid.

Without disguise and censorship, what is left of Freud’s dream theory? Not much—only that instinctual drives could impel dream formation. Evidence does indicate that activating the parts of thelimbic system that produce anxiety, anger and elation shapes dreams. But these nfluences are not “wishes.” Dream

analyses show that the emotions in dreams are as often negative as they arepositive, which would mean that half our “wishes” for ourselves are negative. And as all dreamers know, the emotions in dreams are hardly disguised. They enter into dream plots clearly, frequently bringing unpleasant effects such as nightmares.

Freud was never able to account for why so many dream emotions are negative.

Another pillar of Freud’s model is that because the true meaning of dreams is hidden, the emotions they reflect can be revealed only through his wild-goosechase method of free association, in which the subject relates anything and everything that comes to mind in hopes of stumbling across a crucial connection.

But this effort is unnecessary, because no such concealment occurs. In dreams, what you see is what you get. Dream content is emotionally salient on its face, and the close attention of dreamers and their therapists is all that is needed to see the feelings they represent.

Solms and other Freudians intimate that ascribing dreams to brain chemistry is the same as saying that dreams have no emotional messages. But the statements are not equivalent. The chemical activation-synthesis theory of dreaming, put forth by Robert W. McCarley of Harvard Medical School and me in 1977, maintained only that the psychoanalytic explanation of dream bizarreness as concealed meaning was wrong. We have always argued that dreams are emotionally salient and meaningful. And what about REM sleep?

New studies reveal that dreams can occur during non-REM sleep, but nothing in the chemical activation model precludes this case; the frequency of dreams is simply exponentially higher during REM sleep.

Psychoanalysis is in big trouble, and no amount of neurobiological tinkering can fix it. So radical an overhaul is

necessary that many neuroscientists would prefer to start over and create a neurocognitive model of the mind.

Psychoanalytic theory is indeed comprehensive, but if it is terribly in error,then its comprehensiveness is hardly a virtue. The scientists who share this view stump for more biologically based models of dreams, of mental illness, and of normal conscious experience than those offered by psychoanalysis.

J. Allan Hobson, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has written extensively on the brain basis of the mind and its implications for psychiatry. For more, see Hobson’s book Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep (Oxford University Press, 2003).

The dream reactivates that which escapes forgetting and at the same time brings a work to bear on its elements, a secondary elaboration. As an effect of this secondary elaboration, “the dreams have already been interpreted once before being submitted to our waking interpretation”.8 A text results from this, that of the dream, which is, therefore, in itself an interpretation. Moreover, the dreamer adopts a position in relation to his dream: he exercises an interpretation of the interpretation. When Freud says that the dream is ‘the fulfillment of a wish’,9 he is also making an interpretation of the interpretation which is the dream itself.

In The Direction of the Treatment, Lacan emphasises that Freud is proposing ‘the dream as a metaphor of desire’.10 Something has passed into meaning [sens] in the dream, and, from this passage, results what Freud has called desire. But, as Lacan takes it up again: it is about a ‘desire to have an unsatisfied desire’.11 It is a Wunsch, a wish, about which Lacan says that there are wishes ‘[…] pious, nostalgic, contradictory, farcical’.12 The desire that Freud isolates in the dream reveals the dimension of lack: of the subject’s want-to-be [manque-à-être] which presents itself as a want-to-enjoy [manque-à-jouir].13 Lacan takes up the well-known dream of the ‘beautiful butcher’s wife’ in order to show how a desire refers to another desire, how the dream carries desire to a geometrically progressive power.14 In this reference of one desire to another, Lacan distinguishes — in The Direction of the Treatment and in Radiophonie — two dimensions to this desire of desire which is ordered according to the laws which link the signifying chain: metonymic combination producing displacement and metaphoric substitution with its effect of condensation.15

Watched excellent BBC documentary The Trap:What happened to our dream of freedom of Adam Curtis (author of Happiness machines i was writing about last time). There are three parts and in first part he questions what is freedom all about, what is normality and how mathematical models modeled people and society. Is it true that we are selfish, isolated and suspicious human creatures, constantly monitor and strategies each other, to maximize our own benefit? Measurable predictable androids? For every measurement we need to set a reference. Who is the one who set the reference upon which people should be measured? Is it orchestrated from behind or maybe history by accident takes its mysterious way. Or maybe is mix of both. Did nature equip us with beautiful mirror neurons to understand others in order make the best strategy for maximizing our own result and not for empathy as a base for real humanity !?

Curtis starts with Game theory of John Nash (Beautiful Mind) and how his theory was implemented as a tool in predicting Soviet reaction during the cold war (Nash’s paranoia resonated just well with paranoia of Cold War). And as every idea it found mysterious ways of implementation, far beyond cold war tool. Even faking results to prove its correctness in various situations by those who used it to justify either believes or actions (psychiatry, Vietnam’s war,…)

He continues with psychiatry which defines normality from Freud on. Dark age of psychiatry, colored by electroshocks, followed by anti psychiatric movement (Laing),use of game theory in family dynamics (love is just a strategy to maximize own benefit or dominance over partner). Shame of psychiatric diagnoses due to Rosenhan_experiment ( 8 healthy people were set to mental hospitals. During psychiatric assessment they claimed to be hearing voices that were often unclear, but noticeably said the words “empty,” “hollow” and “thud.” No other psychiatric symptoms were claimed, and apart from giving false names and employment details, further biographical details were truthfully reported. If admitted, the pseudo-patients were asked to “act normally,” report that they felt fine and no longer heard behaved completely normally. 7 of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia, 1 with bipolar disorder. They were all given powerful drugs. They haven’t been allowed to leave the hospital. This was disaster for psychiatric society what lead to rational and quantified questioners to avoid subjective judgment. They set up a list of measurable characteristic (symptoms) on which people answered yes or no, either they have those characteristic or not. Questionnaires have been distributed to ordinary people. Evaluating the results they found that 50% of people have some types of mental disorders. Normal sadness for example became depression.

Psychiatrist started with screening process due to latent mental illness. They’ve spread a check list among people, so people used new definitions of disorders to compare their behaviour with “normal behaviour”. No elite needed to monitor people anymore, people started to monitor themselves by list of “normality”. And if not “normal”, pharmaceutical companies were more than willing to offer them magical Prozac. To be “normal” and constantly happy. And easier manageable.

Its amazing what kind of results some big ideas of liberalization produced (Sartre, Fanon– liberalisation of itself through violence; Che Guara, Arafat…, suport of dictators to liberalize communistic countries, trainings of contra-revolutionaries, fake evidences, …)

So who we are behind what they told us scientists, politicians, religions, behind all this overwhelming social construction?…How is to feel normally behind “normally as they told and suggested us … Is freedom to heavy burden for current level of human existence or is freedom just part of broader cycle and context and not the universal state itself?

Was another one…great sailing weekend. 10 instead of 25 knots as last time…but still great experience…(less adrenalin,…gonna talk about it next time). So effortless pleasure. We won a medal…but really not important…Its not a medal you get, its a team spirit you had, have, will have… Kind of joint effort and joint pleasure…hard to explain… IT IS A FEELING U CAN NOT GAIN ALONE. Although i like solitude, i like team work equally…it gives me pleasure…different one..but important one.

Caught an article today from New Scientist about Mirror Neurons (and i was talking about last time, just came back from sailing… Maybe there is some synchronicity but i don’t know…”who knows”…, my favorite friend’s saying). Just another prove how mirror neurons play important role in our life. I am waiting further proves cos i am believer that they are one of basic ingredients of our socialising and interdependence among all human beings. Even if you see other people’ straggle only on TV…it moves something within you…

People who are good at interpreting facial expressions have “mirror neuron” systems that are more active, say researchers. The finding adds weight to the idea that these cells are crucial to helping us figure out how others are feeling.

Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire both when you do something and when you watch someone else do the same thing.

Because they allow us to mimic what others are doing, it is thought that these neurons may be responsible for why we can feel empathy, or understand others’ intentions and states of mind. People with autism, for instance, show reduced mirror neuron activity during social cognition tasks.

Now Peter Enticott at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues have found evidence supporting this theory. They asked 20 healthy adults to look at pairs of images. In one task, they had to decide if paired images of faces were the same person. In another, they had to decide if both faces were showing the same emotion.

In a separate task, volunteers watched video clips of thumb movement, a hand grasping a pen and a hand while writing, while the activity in the primary motor cortex of the brain, which contains mirror neurons, was recorded.

Emotional link

Now the team had a measure of the “motor potential” in the thumb muscles – for example, how much the thumb was primed to move just by watching another thumb moving. This measure is a proxy for mirror neuron activity, say the researchers.

Enticott’s team found that the volunteers who were better at judging people’s emotions had higher mirror neuron activity in the thumb task. There was no correlation, however, between the ability to recognise faces and mirror neuron activity. This suggests that mirror neurons are involved in understanding emotions as well as in the mimicry of actions.

“[The study] connects the two different functions – the motor aspect with the emotional processing aspect,” says Lindsay Oberman, at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, US. “They show that mirror neurons for motor activity are related to mirror neurons for emotions,” she adds.

And fresh from great sailing weekend, i just can not avoid nice comparison of sailing and yoga (i’ve been practicing it for some while). In both you need a time to realise that you gain the most when you align with the breath, the wind, flow of life…big effort, but suddenly you realise that you gain the most effortless.

Basic instincts, social life
Paradoxes side by side
Don’t submit to stupid rules
Be yourself and not a fool
Don’t accept average habits
Open your heart and push the limits
Open your heart
And push the limits

Although movies have different stories, but share same underlying principle. Like in legend of Babel. God strikes one day, unpredictably, and makes chaos in existing order. Life become fragmented, structure of language as symbol for order, broken. How vulnerable is human being when known landscape disappears, how hard it is to re-build new order from broken pieces. Innocence and illusions are gone. Life opens itself as fresh, open wound…and shows its most primal and brutal face. Things are just happening, without any of our control on it. Spiralling down. Lost within world, lost within self.

While finally re-collecting pieces back, is becoming evident that things are invisible connected, part of same structure and influence each other. Like Butterfly effect in Chaos theory, like quantum entanglement.

Nov 21, 2003 | I haven’t quite made up my mind about “21 Grams.” It has definitely stuck with me, like one of those troubling dreams that the first cup of coffee can’t clear from your head. It’s a brave and admirable film, but not an entirely successful one. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first feature, the amazing “Amores Perros,” was an unrelenting blast of rock en español color and energy, a blood-drenched joyride through the streets of Mexico City that also possessed a startling, and heartbreaking, philosophical depth. In this new movie, González Iñárritu comes north of the border, and the results feel a lot dingier and a fair bit more pedantic.

Paul Rivers movie quote (Sean Penn): “How many lives do we live? How many times do we die? They say we all lose 21 grams… at the exact moment of our death. Everyone. And how much fits into 21 grams? How much is lost? When do we lose 21 grams? How much goes with them? How much is gained? How much is gained? Twenty-one grams. The weight of a stack of five nickels. The weight of a hummingbird. A chocolate bar. How much did 21 grams weigh?”

According to the Christian legend that inspired Babel, language is the barrier that keeps the world’s masses from ascendancy. Handily the world also provides director Alejandro González Iñárritu with an epic stage to exercise his talent for multi-strand storytelling. Occasionally though it feels a little too scattered, so it doesn’t pack as big of a punch as his last film 21 Grams. Still, this is an uncommonly raw and startling portrait of humanity with glittering performances all round.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett have one of the more gripping storylines as a US couple stranded in the Moroccan desert. A stray bullet leaves Susan teetering between life and death but it also exposes a festering wound in her marriage to Richard. The situation breeds a palpable urgency with Iñárritu’s camera marking a quick passage of time as it bobs and weaves between them. Equally compelling are newcomers Boubker Ait El Caid and Said Tarchani as rival siblings playing with their father’s gun when the accident happens.

“Following a course of treatment there is usually an impairment of memory, varying from a slight tendency to forget names to a severe confusional state. The memory defect diminishes gradually over several months. Electroconvulsive therapy, like insulin shock, declined in use after the tranquilizing drugs were introduced.” (E. Britannica)

“Only paranoid survive” (Andrew. S. Grove)

Not taking it as psychopathology, but reasonable doubt is needed. I am back to news. Can’t avoid them even if i would like to. (Next step could be isolation, i guess.) And they make me sad. More food crises, Iran trains Al-Qaeda-intervention needed, South Korean workers died in air trike in Syria!!! working on nuclear plant. O, yes, i do believe…

And some more evidence from independent media how official media is orchestrated and how crises are tool for achieving goals…no matter if there is solid ground for crisis or not. Difference between normal crisis and invented one is that natural is developing gradually while invented one appears out of the blue. (It’s nomal brain acctivity to be shocked while something unpredictable appears all of the sudden). And it’s always named as a crises of century. And people have to be aware and participate into solving it. And all big media call people on duty.

How perverted. Crises, invented by elite and in purpose to keep them alive, is put into the responsibility of good citizen behaviour. And, yea, good citizen is the one, who listens the government guidelines. When nation is in crises, all anarchy and liberalism is act against humanity.

How better to stop the high growth of Chinese economy, which is evident treat to American economy , than with Tibetan riots and high rise prices. Internal affairs and hungry people slow down economical growth for sure. 33 countries, defined by UN, are facing hunger problem right now. They’ve been advised to liberalise the market by UN, WTO or IMT. Liberalisation in dictionary of neoconservatives. Even more perverted.

After all this liberalisation, 3rd countries have 11$ billion minus in food export balance, while they had 6$ billions plus in 1960s. Liberalization of the market in exchange for big loans and to wide open export for American farmers, heavily subsidised by US government. 3rd countries in vicious circle. Less food, more import, high interest rate on loans…By just moving needle in price of food or interest rate, those countries are on verge to survive. What is happening just now. And media are just great tool of bandmasters (see article bellow).

Living in post- communistic country i know how shock theory has been applied in economical terms (Jeffery Sachs), as psychologist i saw the effect on people applied on. In both cases, i am against. It’s manipulation on most primal level of human being. I exclude severe psychopathology cos i don’t know enough about results of treatments there.

“Clarke and her senior aide, Brent T. Krueger, eventually signed up more than 75 retired military officers who penned newspaper op/ed columns and appeared on television and radio news shows as military analysts. The Pentagon held weekly meetings with the military analysts, which continued as of April 20, 2008, when the New York Timesran Barstow’s story. The program proved so successful that it was expanded to issues besides the Iraq War. “Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.”

“The global food crisis is a monetary phenomenon, an unintended consequence of America’s attempt to inflate its way out of a market failure. There are long-term reasons for food prices to rise, but the unprecedented spike in grain prices during the past year stems from the weakness of the American dollar. Washington’s economic misery now threatens to become a geopolitical catastrophe.”

…”As the chart makes clear, the ascent of the cost of rice to $24 from $10 per hundredweight over the past year tracks the declining value of the American dollar. The link between the declining parity of the US unit and the rising price of commodities, including oil as well as rice and other wares, is indisputable. China has bid aggressively for rice all year, and last week banned rice exports, along with Vietnam and several other producers.

For developing countries whose currencies track the American dollar and whose purchasing power declines along with the American unit, this is a catastrophe, as World Bank president Robert Zoellick warned the Group of Seven industrial nations in Washington last week. Food security suddenly has become the top item on the strategic agenda.

Never before in history has hunger become a global threat in a period of plentiful harvests. Global rice production will hit a record of 423 million tons in the 2007-2008 crop year, enough to satisfy global demand. The trouble is that only 7% of the world’s rice supply is exported, because local demand is met by local production. Any significant increase in rice stockpiles cuts deeply into available supply for export, leading to a spike in prices. Because such a small proportion of the global rice supply trades, the monetary shock from the weak dollar was sufficient to more than double its price.

It is not only rice, of course, that the cash-rich countries of the world are buying as a store of value; the price of wheat, soy and other grains has risen almost as fast. This might deal the death-blow to America’s hapless efforts to stabilize the Middle East, where a higher proportion of impoverished people eat off state subsidies than in any other part of the world. Egypt has been the anchor for American diplomacy in the Arab world since the Jimmy Carter administration (1977 to 1981), and is most susceptible to hunger. Food prices have risen by 145% in Lebanon and by 20% in Syria this year. Iraqis depend on food subsidies financed by American aid.

Reduced to essentials, America’s foreign policy sought two unattainable objectives: to stabilize the Middle East and destabilize China. That is an exaggeration, of course, for Washington hoped not to sow instability, but only to put China in its place over the Tibetan affair.”

a. A violent collision or impact; a heavy blow. See Synonyms at collision.

b. The effect of such a collision or blow.

2.

a. Something that jars the mind or emotions as if with a violent unexpected blow.

b. The disturbance of function, equilibrium, or mental faculties caused by such a blow; violent agitation.

3. A severe offense to one’s sense of propriety or decency; an outrage.

4. A potentially fatal physiological reaction to a variety of conditions, including illness, injury, hemorrhage, and dehydration, usually characterized by marked loss of blood pressure, diminished blood circulation, and inadequate blood flow to the tissues.

5. The sensation and muscular spasm caused by an electric current passing through the body or a body part.

6. A sudden economic disturbance, such as a rise in the price of a commodity.

There are multiple causes of shock and symptoms depending on which type of shock you are dealing with. Causes of Psychological Shock

Receiving disturbing news such as the death of loved one

Being involved in a traumatic event such as a car accident, or being the victim of crime

Psychological shock can disrupt your life, leaving you engrossed and preoccupied with the event or news that caused the shock. The individual may also have difficulty coping with day to day functioning such as personal relationships and work.

If the psychological shock symptoms do not improve and continue to persist, leaving the individual unable to return to normal life, post-traumatic stress disorder may have developed.

The individual with psychological shock symptoms may be affected in the following ways:

Intrusion – the individual fixates on the event and news by playing it over and over again in his or her mind

Avoidance – the individual withdraws from normal activities and may resort to alcohol and drugs to numb the pain

Although i am not fan of comedies, especially American sit-comes, i dearly love some black comedies. Alex de la Iglesia’s first movie, (produced by Pedro Almodovar), Accion mutante, is one of them. Watched it many years ago and it so funny sci-fi horror comedy. Still laughing when i remember it. Brilliant satire, with underlined critique of social system and its imperatives ( to rid the universe of pretty people and superficiality by terrorist group of ugly mutants ). In a future world ruled by good-looking people, …

Watched today his next master piece, very original, absurd surrealistic comedy “Crimen ferpecto”(The Perfect crime). So much black humor, with social satire on consumerism and machism. Some twists in movie are so brilliant. Alex de la Iglesia is very talented and very underrated director. Just increased my love toward Spanish movies.

It’s hilarious. It’s poignant. It’s artistic. It’s even philosophical at times. I can’t imagine anyone not liking this film. “Crimen ferpecto” is a great surrealistic comedy along the lines of “Being John Malkovich”, “One Night at McCools” or even the masterpiece “Brazil”.

The plot begins bizarre, and from there it gets ever bizarrer. Set in a department store (the perfect metaphor for the human condition!), this film brilliantly weaves the themes of glamorous/plastic life versus the mundane/real. Trapped between worlds and desperately trying to achieve the former is our hero Rafael, a man whose entire life exists within the ladies’ clothing department. Somehow he gets wrapped up in murder, blackmail and ectoplasmic visitations from lovable corpses. Yeah, I told you it gets bizarre.

But despite the zany plot, there’s a very poignant & sober message that runs just below the surface. It’s subtle, but it comes to fruition during the magnificent climax when we realize exactly what this whole wacky movie is about. If you’ve paid attention to symbolism, metaphor, allegory and all that intellectual jazz, you’ll get it, and you’ll see how everything fits into place. If not, fine, you’ll enjoy the picture anyway because it’s just plain funny. The beauty is that you can take it at your own pace. Great film. Damn near perfect. Er… ferpect.

This year is coming his new movie (this time thriller) The Oxford Murders . Haven’t seen it yet, but i wonder how good he is in different movie genre

and fear of falling on every corner you turn
you can feel their shaking and heartbeats’ echoes

than resonance breaks and symphony becomes silence

deep silence, omnipotent wall between two worlds…

divided souls are never the same again

big emptiness posses their rooms

and screams as million crying babies

then one day …new beam, from outer space

enters the empty room and tenderly starts to vibrate

…new dance, new creation, new symphony
new mighty force wants to extend across the universe

…..

In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate at maximum amplitude at certain frequencies, known as the system’s resonance frequencies (or resonant frequencies). At these frequencies, even small periodic driving forces can produce large amplitude vibrations, because the system stores vibrational energy. Resonant systems can be used to generate vibrations of a specific frequency, or pick out specific frequencies from a complex vibration containing many frequencies.